Science, technology, and medicine have a major impact on our lives. We live with constant technological innovation and scientific discovery, and this changes the conditions that we live in, as well as the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Science, technology, and medicine are thus entangled with our values, our culture, and our politics, and they have an important impact on policymaking and action. Making value judgments is important to the way that we fund, conduct, evaluate, and apply scientific research.

We invite proposals for papers that engage with these issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches, including philosophy of science, technology, & medicine, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy, history, science and technology studies, policy studies, and natural and social sciences.

This year's conference will have three target themes:

Gender, sex, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine

Science and values in the work of Paul K. Feyerabend, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Against Method

Distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate roles for values in science

We welcome any paper and panel proposals in the broad area of values in medicine, science, and technology, but we will give priority to proposals on these target themes.

Suggested topics for papers and panels include:

The value of diversity in epistemic communities

Sexism, heterosexism, or transphobia in technology culture

Sex and gender in medical research or practice

Feminist critique of gender differences research

Feyerbend's relationship to feminist philosophy of science

Feyerabend on science, values, and democracy

The indirect/direct role distinction

The ideal of well-ordered science

The cognitive status of values and value judgments

We will consider proposals for individual papers, but also thematic panel sessions and more informal formats. Please feel free to contact us early to discuss potential panel formats at values@utdallas.edu

For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the topic of the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant's contribution.

Please do not submit more than once for each presentation format (so you can submit as part of a group symposium as well as an individual paper, but not two papers). Participants will generally only be able to appear on the program once in any capacity. Papers that are not accepted for presentation will be automatically considered in our open roundtables session.

Deadline is 1st of February 2015.

The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology works to foster diversity and inclusiveness in our programming, events, and outreach efforts. Proposal authors and panel organizers will be asked to submit an optional 50-100 word diversity statement to explain their commitment and contributions to diversity in their proposal and in general. Conference proposals will be reviewed for quality, but final programming decisions will be made with diversity and inclusiveness in mind. Contributed paper proposals will be anonymously reviewed at all stages, whereas final decisions on organized panel proposals may consider identity of the panelists.